It will be readily understood that this novel technique, at the time of its appearance, did not pass unchallenged. It was evidently a manner, an eccentricity—a trick of colour, a playing with the public vision! Many endeavoured to understand and reproduce the “Cazin effects.” How was it done? And it was bruited by the baffled that M. Cazin painted behind locked doors! The sorcery of the master was not to be discovered, nor was there an élite who, behind the curtain out of gaping sight, learned the power that created “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”
Will amateurs learn one day that rules of rhetoric cannot teach the scribbler how to write a lyric?—that the atelier cannot impart the sign to make brush and palette create that which is none other than the individuality of the painter? Cazin’s tender, mysterious treatment, Corot’s profound tranquillity, Turner’s golden flame, the genius of the masters, are their technique.
Cazin knew nothing of the common struggle of those artists who are obliged to ingratiate themselves into the public favour. He was accepted at once, and soon beloved—an uncommon biography. And his agreeable relations with the public, the atmosphere of
MOONLIGHT
welcome and liking with which his work was met, his own family relations (of the most happy and genial kind), all is evident in his art. His pictures are full of the influence of the repose—“la douceur infinie qui répand les âmes qui sont en paix.”
Cazin possessed a strongly developed decorative sense. His contemporaries appreciated it when they gave him the supervision of the hanging of pictures at the different exhibitions and made him conservateur of the Musée du Luxembourg itself. This special sense is evident in his work, as, for example, the grouping in “L’Ours et l’Amateur des Jardins,” “La Parole de Socrate,” in the drawings and studies for his various pictures, designs which in many instances strongly suggest fresco and are Italian in their genre.
Until 1888 his subjects had been chiefly symbolic, chosen from Biblical scenes; figures predominated in these canvases. After this period the character of his work changed, and he devoted himself to landscape painting, and as a landscapist he will pass down to fame. For Cazin chose to surround his conception of figure-painting with the very acme of his art; with the fruit of years of patience, the mystery of labour and all that his poetic soul knew of the seasons and of changing nights and days. For even in the most important canvases, where figures fill the foreground, the value of the paintings is in their backgrounds and surroundings.